An 18-Year-Old Reflects on Starting College in Lockdown and What She Will Tell Her Children About the Pandemic
Debbie Weil chats with her niece, Phoebe Weil, about her experience living through COVID. While the audience for this podcast is those in midlife and older (50-plus), there is a lot to be learned from someone younger about what it’s like to handle the disappointments of the pandemic. Someone who’s been missing out on some of life’s most memorable milestones.
Debbie knew just the person to tell this story: her 18-year-old niece. Phoebe missed senior spring of high school, she missed her high school graduation, and now she’s started college where she’s been in lockdown on her campus all fall.
But she remains so very optimistic. Inspired by Anne Frank, she’s been keeping a journal that she hopes to share, one day, with her children. She’s hitting the books to study organic chemistry (she tells us about the advantage of attending an all women’s college as a science major). And she’s keeping up her YouTube channel, which has over 5,000 subscribers.
Phoebe notes that it was Anne Frank's impulse to record history while living through it that inspired her to start writing a journal. She clarified in an email: "One doesn’t know how powerful an accounting of a historic moment can be while they’re living in it. I wanted to document my day-to-day life so that in the future I could read how I was feeling during the pandemic we live in now. In no way am I equating my experience living in COVID-19 to Anne Frank’s experience in the Holocaust."
Finally, what’s Phoebe's NEW BEST THING to come out of the pandemic? Writing letters, snail mail letters. And she’s prolific. Her Aunt Debbie and Uncle Sam have received a bunch.
We can all get a lift from Phoebe’s steady and refreshingly positive attitude.
Mentioned in this episode or useful:
- Phoebe Weil’s YouTube Channel with over 5,000 subscribers
- A week in the life of boarding school (Phoebe’s video blog that has almost 150,000 views)
- STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math)
- Historical women’s colleges in the U.S. (Phoebe attends Wellesley College, from which Hillary Clinton graduated)
Note from Debbie
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Credits:
- Host: Debbie Weil
- Producer: Far Out Media
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- Music: Lakeside Path by Duck Lake
Connect with us:
- Email: thegapyearpodcast@gmail.com
- Debbie Weil and Sam Harrington's blog: Gap Year After Sixty
